Revisiting John Updike

It’s a given that reading is just as important as writing or maybe even more so. I’m always reading something. In the last month I read the first two novels that John Updike wrote about Rabbit Angstrom (Rabbit, Run and Rabbit Redux).

My intent is to read some well-known and well-regarded books written by people of my generation. Philip Roth is on my list as well. I have no doubt I can learn a thing or two about novel-writing from these books.

I won’t get into a discussion of plot and characters here. I am more interested in Updike’s writing style. The books are long. I bought old paperback editions and the typeface is so tiny I could barely get through five to ten pages at a sitting.

Recently new novelists have been told to vary the length of their chapters and sentences and paragraphs and use a lot a dialogue instead of long narratives. Updike consistently breaks those rules. The two books I read had long, long chapters, paragraphs and sentences and little dialogue. However his narrative is rich with his stream of consciousness impressions and beautiful descriptions of the outside world and the people in it that include the social mores, politics, and current events of the post-World War II times he write about. Race relations, repressed females, graphic sex, tragedy and death, family relations, and the small town-middle class environment are all there. He was a master at creating characters and locations and events that continue to stay with this reader long after I finished the books.

I’ve taken a break from Rabbit for a bit. The Rabbit books originally were a quartet: Rabbit, Run, Rabbit Redux, Rabbit Is Rich, and Rabbit at Rest (the book in which the Rabbit character dies). However, in 2001 Updike wrote a novella called Rabbit Remembered. I promise to read the remaining three this year. They are waiting for me on my to-be-read bookshelf.

Since putting Updike down, I’ve started reading the stunning All the Light We Cannot See, a current best seller by Anthony Doerr. Doerr’s style is the exact opposite of Updike’s. He has very short chapters some only a page or two, and he alternates between his two main characters in almost every chapter. And though his descriptions are like poetry, they are sparse. So are his sentences and paragraphs. It’s amazing how two wonderful writers can have such unique styles.

So I think the lesson for me here is that we writers have different styles as it should be, and maybe it’s not so important to follow the rules.